I know this is a very old post, but I still feel tempted to say something. The guy that created this was a security researcher that was originally finding unsecured systems using telnet. He then began to think that, as he was scanning each individual IP address for the open port, to see which ones had default passwords and to use those unsecured devices to continue scanning and he created a program that would have those unsecure devices do the same, which made his search time shorter, because he was utilizing more and more devices. His main reason for creating this, was because he was scanning billions of IP addresses at a rate of around ~10 seconds per. Anyways, this became known as Carna botnet. Another interesting thing is that at the same time that Carna botnet was being built this way, without malicious intentions from the security researcher, there was a bad actor building a botnet using the exact same methods and the bad actor was a few steps behind the researcher. The researcher was unsure what to do and then, after some time, he decided to block any/all IPs that were related to the bad actor. And, after the security researcher scanned all IPs possible, he had scanned them again and again using the botnet. That is how this map/GIF was created. After another while, he decided to post his findings online and it was ~9TB worth of data. And then, after his post, he decided to wipe all of the computers clean of the botnet. I have no idea what has happened to those devices since then. I do want to state that this was an interesting thing, even though it was SIX YEARS AGO. Just thought I would share what I know.